- Plymouth Adventure -- Fact or Fiction?
- By Elsie Hamel
At the conclusion of the film Plymouth Adventure, the Pilgrims, physically and mentally, have withstood the rigors of persecution in their homeland, of the long and difficult voyage, and of their first year in the wild, desolate New World. Ultimately, this paradigm becomes the emblem of the founding of our nation and the beginning of a whole panorama of different versions each time the story is retold--some of them factual and some of them mythical. The purpose of this essay is to: 1) survey the scope of the Pilgrim mystique; 2) sort myth from fact in the story; 3) pinpoint the sources of the information we have about these settlers; 4) establish why this group was chosen rather than any of a myriad of settlers who came to the New...
- The Rest of the Story: What Mourt's Relation Tells Us About Relations between the Pilgrims and the Indians
- By Rosanny Bello, Lauren Eisner, Edward J. Gallagher, Timothy Guida, Jaime Miller, Megan Snyder, Daniel Spangler
The "adventure" in Plymouth Adventure refers to the trials and tribulations of our revered Pilgrim forebears on the way to America. The film-makers made the decision to tell only part of the Pilgrim story. There are, for instance, no images of first contact with Native Americans, who appear only fleetingly in the deep background, virtually out of focus, in the film's penultimate scene. The film has no interest in intercultural relations. To us fifty years later, this is a meaningful omission. The film portrays America in a self-serving way as -- in Perry Miller's now troublesome term -- a "vacant wilderness" (see the preface to his Errand into the Wilderness, 1956) and renders an important part of our history invisible...
